1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to the field of wireless data transmission, and more particularly to data transmission in mobile devices.
2. Background Discussion
Mobile devices today are capable of performing many tasks. Conventional mobile devices include the capability of sending data and receiving data at the device, such as text messaging, email, and web browsing. Conventional mobile devices operate within a cellular network. Typically, a cellular network includes a Short Message Service (SMS) cell broadcast service as well as one-to-one messaging and one-to-few messaging capabilities. The SMS cell broadcast service provides an efficient way for the network to propagate/broadcast information to a particular cell broadcast area. The network accomplishes this SMS cell broadcast communication of information by broadcasting a single message to any receivers able to receive a communication from the network that are within the geographic area that the footprint of the cell covers. In other words, SMS cell broadcast is designed for simultaneous delivery of messages to multiple users in a specified area. Whereas conventional SMS is a one-to-one and one-to-few service, cell broadcast is one-to-many geographically-focused service. Cell broadcast enables messages to be communicated to multiple mobile phone customers who are located within a given part of its network coverage area at the time the message is broadcast.
Communicating with specific groups of mobile devices operating within a cellular network using an SMS cell broadcast service has proven to be a difficult. For example, broadcast messaging floods the cell with a broadcast message and results in all mobile devices receiving the broadcast message whether the users of the mobile devices wanted to receive the broadcast message or not. Typically, vendors use point-to-point SMS messaging to reach the mobile devices of users who have subscribed to the vendor's services. In such an example, a vendor can send a promotional offer to a user who is subscribed to the vendors service notifying them of a special promotional offering. The user of the mobile device that received the offer can easily reply to the message containing the offer as the message is a point-to-point SMS message that includes the origination address embedded within the message.
Unfortunately, the use of point-to-point SMS messaging within a network is not an efficient use of the network's resources (e.g., bandwidth) as point-to-point SMS messaging generates more traffic and network congestion with the use of individual SMS messages.
A superior cell broadcast mechanism and technique have eluded those skilled in the art, until now.